Checking in for February for my "Designing a Well-Lived Life" blogging. This is about making small changes during the year to make larger changes.

• Focus on health (exercise, eating, stress): This past week I started chemotherapy for handling my stage IV rectal cancer. That was also combined with other tests, appointments, mediport placement, liver biopsy, and more blood draws than a vampire at a buffet. Health has been my number one priority, and continues to be my priority. I'm trying to work around these to get a little bit of exercise and help keep myself active, but there have been moments where I just want to sleep. This continues to be an area of focus.

• Complete my game design projects to allow others to enjoy them: Not much progress here. See above regarding being tired. I did sit down and shore up a little bit on one of my games.

• Do more non-work programming and chase my "white whales": I have done a bit with 6502 assembly on the Atari 8bit computer. That's been oddly relaxing. There's a series of videos about programming the Atari 8bit that I'll share later on in a separate post. More to come on this front.

• Be more mindful and focused in my day-to-day activities: This has been helping me keep myself grounded while I'm dealing with my health. Focusing on "what am I doing now" has been a godsend for not spiraling into the brain-paths that I usually find myself descending. So this has been a huge win.

• Add more joy into my life, either with games, reading, or other relaxing activities: I found myself playing with some emulators this past week. I'm still playing with what my concentration will allow me to do, but it's been helpful.

• Allow myself to do more with less (distractions, acquisition, commitments, etc.): I've cut myself off of Kickstarters so that has taken away one of the avenues of spending money. I also experimented with using command-line tools for accessing social media instead of the web-based client. I've had some success with that, but I do find myself wanting to bring up the website to get some external stimulus. I did cut out a few unspoken commitments because of my health. Still practicing with this.

• Notice when I'm overwhelmed and let go as much as I can: Ho boy. This got a workout this month. Last-minute changes in my schedule, new experiences, and the like usually overwhelm me. Sometimes I did experience that overwhelm. But I also learned to just let things happen and let things be.

• Declutter: I contacted some folks to take on some of the stuff that I want to declutter. Calling this a win for now.

• Continue removing debt: Medical bills are quite the opposite of removing debt. That's caused me to be very selective about what I'm purchasing. Still needs more work, but I'm calling this a minor win.

March will have two more chemo delivery events. I haven't experienced anything like this before so there's some uncertainty around that. I'm still being mindful about what's going on with my life and my body. Still confident that I can beat this bastard. More to come as I know more.

(Also hoping to do some more blogging here of things other than my health so stay tuned for that)